Four things affect rewards for tipping:
  1. how high the content ranked relative to other content
  2. how early you tipped it
    • All else being equal, 2nd tipper gets half the 1st, 3rd gets 1/3rd, and so on
  3. how much you tipped
  4. your trust level, e.g. how reliably you are at upvoting good content early
Yes, I read about this. But I am still interested to look into the code which implements this when I have time.
I think your approach is an innovation in itself. Were you inspired by something to come up with this? Web of trust in GPG for example?